Farms and Heat

[lordshire]

So the past few days have been quite dandy.  Tuesday I went to Hickory Nut Farm in Fairview with my friend Elin to get a tour from her friend Kate.  The farm is only about 15 minutes away from downtown Asheville but you would never know it because it is 400 acres of forests, fields, pastures, ponds, creeks, and old houses.  The first thing we did was visit Kate in her cabin which is fairly new and a very cozy A frame with a badass loft.  Then we got to see the piggies, the sheep, the chickens, and the horses.  My favorite parts though were the orchards and the old farmhouses/inns.  I wish I had taken pictures now, but the apple orchard was on the side of a mountain and reminded me a lot or how the orchard around my house once looked before it got developed.  The farmhouse was huge and built in the early 1800s originally as an inn.  We met the lady of the house while she was cleaning off some fresh eggs and she gave us a tour of the main floor.  It was filled with old portraits and murals of how the valley once looked and even had a painting of when the Confederates would march through the property.   She had a guest registry all the way from when the inn first opened and we saw that Andrew Johnson had stayed there once (even though he was a traitor as the less liberal elements of my family/past would say).  There was a point when she stopped talking and gave a push on one of the shelves in the library room and it opened into a secret room.  I am quite envious of the owners of this house.  She wrote down our names and we got her e-mail adress to see if we can be interns and live there next summer.  I just don't know if we would get paid.  After that we ate at Thai Basil and then saw "Once," which was pretty good and bittersweet even though there wasn't much plot but I liked the music.

Got a haircut today then went to see my grandmother.  She has a hearing aid now which has already made it much easier to talk to her.  I also started My name is Asher Lev to get ready for TAing Jay's class and I can't put it down.  I've gotten so socially awkward/defficient in college, I really need to prep all I can before I get in front of a bunch of freshman and try to act like I know what I'm doing.